Trivial Pursuits

David Runciman

Like many millions​ of people, I usually begin my morning doing a few gentle word puzzles on newspaper websites: Connections and Strands in the New York Times, Polygon and Codeword in the Times, plus a couple of others. I do it strictly by the clock so it doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes, and I don’t take it very seriously – I have till now resisted the endless offers to pay for a subscription that would allow me to track my scores, share my results and compare my performance with that of others. Nonetheless, and though I would swear I am not a superstitious person, I am conscious of a gut feeling when I do well (all the words, all the connections, no hints!) that the day is going to be a good one and an even stronger sense when I mess up that it’s a sign of more bad things to come. Do I believe this nonsense in order to motivate me to try harder or do I try harder because I believe this nonsense? I have no idea. But it works for me, especially since it makes me feel that by the time I get to the news in the newspapers the important stuff has already happened, which makes the news easier to digest.

The games I play each day are almost embarrassingly simple; there are far tougher ones that I avoid because they would take too long and would probably leave me with a sense of impending disaster. There is a world of game-playing out there that makes far greater demands of the players, from elegant cryptic crosswords through to complex strategy board games and on to multi-level role-playing computer games. Some of these games will take over your life if you let them. At the same time, prompts that come with even the simplest online games are designed to make you hand over more than just your passing attention. Why do newspapers take so much time and trouble to promote their games and puzzles sections to their readers? Because they know that it’s an excellent hook for keeping them on the website. That way, even if they don’t sign up for all the performance metrics on offer, they are still conforming to the various measures media outlets value – minutes, clicks, idents and the rest.

My modest game-playing habit falls somewhere between these two poles. On the one hand, there are better, smarter and more rewarding games that I could be playing. On the other, there are far more intrusive and extractive forms of gamification and data-harvesting that lie in wait for unwary participants in just about any online (and indeed offline) activity. C. Thi Nguyen wants us to recognise the enormous difference between these two ways of playing. One offers rich human experiences. The other threatens to turn all human experiences into a measurable and marketable product. The reason we might muddle them up is that they both rely on the same mechanism: scoring. All games need scoring systems – whether simple or complex – to make it possible to know who is winning, or if it is a collaborative game, what the shared goal is. Without a measure of progress, it is impossible to be sure whether any progress is being made. Money-sucking metrics are also a form of scoring – sometimes explicitly (‘Improve your credit score!’), but more often buried in the background. We don’t get to see the way the time we spend playing games improves the ability of online platforms to sell our data to their advertisers. But we can be sure all the same that we’ve become a number.

Nguyen, a keen game-player himself, suggests a series of useful tests for distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy scoring systems. Good games deploy essentially arbitrary means of keeping score. Their measures of achievement exist not as ends in themselves but simply as devices to allow creative/competitive/co-operative activity to take place under their auspices. The fact that in contract bridge spades and hearts score thirty points per trick and diamonds and clubs score twenty points per trick doesn’t mean anything in itself. It is not a gauge of actual value. It is only when playing the game that these scores matter because only then do they give the players a structure within which they can try to be their best selves. By contrast, bad games pretend that their scores have an independent meaning. Nguyen, who is also a university teacher, gives the example of the endless ways that universities are now ranked according to various metrics. These measures are often fairly arbitrary – do admissions criteria or graduate employment rates really tell you what you need to know about the quality of the education on offer? But once the measure becomes a rating and institutions can move up and down a league table, the scores start to acquire a life of their own. The arbitrary becomes an unavoidable determinant of achievement. Everyone ends up playing the game.

From this distinction other things follow. Good games are voluntary. Players decide to take part – and to sign up to the scoring system – because they want to enjoy what the game has to offer, not because they feel they have no other choice. Good games advertise their essential arbitrariness rather than trying to conceal it: the rules exist only so that the game can be played. Bad games hide their arbitrariness, dress up their rules as having an independent legitimacy and aim to trap players into taking part. Think of all those universities and colleges spinning their wheels trying to rise up the rankings. Many would much rather not be playing that game. It’s time-consuming and expensive. But they have to pretend it’s meaningful in order to motivate themselves to invest the necessary resources. And once they start down that path it is very difficult to stop. Bad games reinforce the fallacy of sunk costs. A good game is one you can choose to walk away from, which is the reason that the decision to keep playing feels empowering rather than enervating. Nguyen quotes Bernard Suits, who sums up the difference like this: games add value when the players ‘voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them’. Anything else – involuntary participation, unavoidable obstacles, lack of exit options – represents something very different. Then the game is a form of value capture.

Nguyen fears that we live in a world in which good games are being driven out by bad ones. The most elegant online puzzles become something else when they are also a device for extracting marketable data. Good games should be mildly addictive, but once a game becomes just another one of the compulsions that underpin the attention economy then its hold over its players will be a drain on their autonomy rather than an expression of it. Meanwhile, most scoring systems are not really games at all. They are means of reducing the variety and complexity of human experience into a version that is easier to package up and parcel out. This suits corporations with something to sell, governments with something to control and people with something to hide (what else is a credit score for?). The result is a flatter, blander, more fungible world: most things lose their distinctive qualities when they get turned into a number. What they gain is a measure of interchangeability. This works well for organisations that are interested in economies of scale. It works badly for anyone who just wants to do their own thing. Nguyen calls the difference between these two outlooks ‘the Gap’; it represents the distance between what is easy to measure and what actually matters.

But Nguyen wants to go further. Just as he is clear-eyed about the vices of a gamified existence, he is starry-eyed about the virtues of a game-playing life. There is nothing he likes better than losing himself in a new passion: soup-making, yo-yos, rock climbing. It rarely lasts, because past a certain point the rules of the game that had seemed to liberate hidden forms of expression come to stifle his urge to experiment. But that simply means it’s time to try something new. For Nguyen, we only learn what’s valuable by choosing to commit to activities that have no inherent value. What counts is the pursuit of excellence under conditions of freely chosen constraint. If we are constrained by others, then we are not free to be ourselves. But if we are altogether unconstrained then we don’t have to try. Choosing to engage in trivial pursuits gives us the external discipline of rules without the burden of coercion. ‘Games matter,’ Nguyen says, ‘because games don’t matter.’ If we can remember this, we will do far better in a world in which hidden forms of coercion are proliferating.

Maybe. But I have two problems with this account. First, on the page, it’s lifeless. There is a lot in The Score about Nguyen’s excitement and then frustration and then renewed excitement as he masters new skills or plays new games. I am sure it was all meaningful in the moment. But it’s dull in the retelling. Yo-yo tricks – at the level of Nguyen’s – clearly require a high level of technical excellence. I wouldn’t mind watching him in action (there are videos apparently). But it would take a writer of rare skill – which Nguyen is not – to make it compelling reading. I once knew someone who competed in national fireworks championships, which turn out to involve all sorts of arcane rules to help determine who is best at lighting up the night sky. The YouTube channel to which he directed me so I could watch his bronze-medal-winning performance was amazing, at least at first viewing. But after a while it all started to seem a little samey for anyone who didn’t know what the judges were looking for. What it was not at any point, however, was fun to hear about.

Nguyen writes​ like an analytic philosopher. He values definitional clarity and his book pursues ever sharper distinctions between the games that add value and the forms of gamification that take it away. The result is an argument that soon becomes repetitive. Each refinement of his central point says more or less the same thing: when people score you without your consent, they want something from you, which will be oppressive, but when you choose to score yourself then new possibilities open up. Bad scoring produces convergence. Good scoring encourages variety. Bad scoring projects power. Good scoring resists it. And so on. It’s a binary picture. This is the other problem. The world – including the world of game-playing – isn’t binary at all. Much of it doesn’t fit that pattern.

What’s missing from The Score are hard cases and history. In some classic earlier histories of the way human beings live through and under arbitrary systems of game-like rules, one standard example is the evolution of manners, or etiquette. For instance, in Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (‘On the Social Function of Games’) from 1938, game-playing is identified as running side by side with the emergence of civility, whereby codes of behaviour are established to regulate otherwise chaotic human interactions, often at the cost of freedom of expression. Seen in one light, civility manifested as etiquette is clearly oppressive. You don’t get to choose the rules which say that this spoon is for the soup and you don’t get to opt out either: pick up the wrong utensil and you won’t get invited back. Good manners can serve as a tool of class oppression by dint of their essential arbitrariness – we decide what counts as good behaviour so that you can’t share in its benefits. And even though they are not numerical, social codes are also a scoring system. The better you play the game the more access you will have. But one false move can send you back to the beginning.

So far, so coercive – etiquette looks like a bad game to play in Nguyen’s terms. Who wants to dress up like a stiff when you could be finding your personal style in role-playing rituals of your own choosing? But etiquette can also be understood as a form of liberation, and not only because any fixed set of rules allows for individual creativity when it is fully internalised. For some people, at least, knowing down to the last detail what is expected is a way of discovering what is possible. Pushing the boundaries requires a clear sense of what the boundaries are. Cultures of self-expression are sometimes also cultures of heightened social formality taken to the point at which mastery is its own kind of subversion. Was Oscar Wilde oppressed by the rules of high Victorian manners? No, because it was a scoring system he could master and its manipulation was the making of him. He was oppressed by the game he could not play, which demanded conformity to sexual codes that remained closed off to him. Even then, he believed he might be rescued by another game, the one played in the law courts (Huizinga, who was Dutch, thought the English legal system provided a quintessential example of the playful elements present in even the most serious enterprises – just look at the wigs!). But Wilde never learned how to play that game and it was his undoing.

Although social etiquette can feel like a private language, the truth is that it isn’t. It is public. Purely private languages, as for example might exist inside a family between siblings, genuinely exclude outsiders. Social codes give outsiders a way in by making the rules of the game available to those who are in a position to access them. The only thing worse than arriving at a party where you have misunderstood the dress code is arriving at a party where there is a dress code you haven’t been told about. Many rules of behaviour work that way – they are kept hidden so that newcomers and anyone else trying to interfere can be made to look like fools by definition. Most criminal enterprises operate on that basis. The honour that exists among thieves is in part a way of ensuring that non-thieves don’t get a look in. When ostensibly non-criminal activities such as banking work against the public interest it is usually because the bankers have started speaking a language no one else understands. This could be a nod and a wink, or it could be an impenetrable algorithmic code. Either way, they are scoring us but they won’t let us score them.

One remedy is to insist on measures of value imposed from the outside, which breaches Nguyen’s definition of a good game but is often essential for public accountability. Just as etiquette allows for social mobility as well as social exclusion, so scoring systems can be a way of overcoming what might otherwise be impenetrable barriers to entry. We rank things not simply because we want to flatten social existence but also because we want to break down the hidden rules of the game. Numbers are not esoteric even if the things bankers do with them might be. Their accessibility and interchangeability make them very useful for uncovering the private capture of public goods. Yes, there is an inevitable cost to this. Those numbers lack the nuance of personal knowledge and individual connoisseurship. The insiders will always think the people measuring them up are vulgarians. But without a code that can be accessed in the absence of insider knowledge, the people in possession of the field will carry on winning every time.

Though he is not much interested in history, one of the villains in Nguyen’s story is the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, characterised here as the thinker who sought to give unaccountable sovereigns the power to decide the meaning of words – the ultimate scoring system. For Hobbes, the king must choose what is good and what is bad, what is war and what is peace, which sounds distinctly Orwellian. Surely, Nguyen suggests, we must be free to decide these things for ourselves? And it’s a short step from Hobbes to Jeremy Bentham, the man behind the hedonic calculus – ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ – which seemingly reduces human experience to a score. Bentham wanted to ensure that all words had a meaning that could be given a measurable value – he was the man who tried to put a price on love. Seen in these terms, Hobbes and Bentham can appear both sinister and mad. But they were neither. For each of them, assigning things a value that was legible if arbitrary (in the case of Hobbes) or calculable but crude (in the case of Bentham) had to be compared to the alternatives. Hobbes did not want to leave the choice about what really mattered in the hands of ancient universities with their taste for Aristotelian gobbledegook, or partisan churchmen playing their lunatic biblical word games, or vainglorious aristocrats with their arcane codes of honour. Better a single political authority to decide than a professor or a bishop or a duke; better rules that could be understood by all than rules that were decided by factional elites. Bentham championed a utilitarian measure of value to get past a legal and political system that hid its true workings behind obscure Latin phraseology and meaningless parliamentary ritual. Bentham knew that the people in power didn’t want anyone to see what they were up to and so made it as obscure as possible. Scoring their activities and institutions – Tyburn, Bedlam and Newgate, rotten boroughs and enclosed estates, slums and workhouses, pressed sailors and forever wars – on a hedonic scale might seem crass. But it wasn’t as hideously cruel as the things it was scoring.

Of course, states and sovereigns can abuse their power. Utilitarianism can itself be cruel when it sees individuals as simply the means to a greater collective end. Any scoring system can be abused once it gets captured. But the fact remains that a scoring system can also be the most effective means of exposing value capture by revealing what is happening on the inside. Scoring, like everything else, is not binary. It is dialectical. What makes a game liberating to play is also what makes it stifling and oppressive: in both cases it’s because the rules are arbitrary. It is not simply, as Nguyen acknowledges, that good games can turn bad when the players get too good at them and the constraints that had spurred creativity start to stifle it. Then the solution is to take up a new game. But at the social level the scoring systems that are needed to curb arbitrary power are also the ones that encourage it. And there is often no other game to play. The problem with university rankings is that they are corrupting because they are useful. As Hobbes knew, universities often need to be judged by standards other than their own. How else can this happen except by applying a measure of value from the outside? And once applied, how to stop interested parties comparing the way different institutions perform? A points-based system is obviously reductive, but without some easily accessible mode of assessment the insiders will retain their advantage. Nguyen would like to think that those with the inside knowledge of a particular pursuit – philosophy, yo-yo – are the best judges of its true value. But this is not true. They are both the best and the worst judges. That is why they can’t simply be left to choose the game they wish to play.

With yo-yo, of course, letting a devotee get carried away about its merits as an activity isn’t going to cause any real harm. Nguyen’s case is based on comparing the damage done by pervasive social scoring systems to the innocence of private pursuits. But we have pervasive social scoring systems precisely because passionate private pursuits so often get out of hand. This was Hobbes and Bentham’s point. It would be nice to think that we have moved beyond their world, in which self-serving professors, bishops and dukes got to call the shots. But we haven’t, even if the professors might now be podcasters and the dukes are more likely to be tech titans. Unaccountable power still needs to be held to account, which means it needs to be scored, which means the scoring system will be subject to capture by people trying to exercise unaccountable power. That’s the dialectic we are dealing with, as we always have been.

Because Nguyen is so keen to sort out the gamester sheep from the gamified goats he fails to see how often these are the same people. He is a great believer in the liberating power of games such as Dungeons and Dragons, which encourage their players to reinvent themselves. At the same time, he loathes the new breed of Silicon Valley surveillance capitalists, who have inveigled their way into our lives. Yet many of the monsters of our metricised world – from Elon Musk to Peter Thiel to Reid Hoffman – grew up playing D&D and will tell you it taught them everything they know. People change, but the problem with reinvention is that it doesn’t only lead in the direction of liberation. Nguyen contrasts belief systems that are open to the complexity of the world with those that want to reduce complexity to a more fungible form of understanding. As an example of the latter, he cites conspiracy theories, which, like many shallow metrics, ‘present us with a more manageable, intellectually tractable version of the world’. But as he also concedes, conspiracy theories are a lot like fantasy games. They are a means for people to act out a version of the world under conditions of constraint they have determined for themselves – conspiracy theorists are the ones who get to decide what counts and what doesn’t. Perhaps it is possible to argue that conspiracy theory is healthy role-playing when it happens in private and unhealthy when it spills into the public domain. But I’m not sure how that line is going to be held.

In the end, Nguyen ties himself up in knots trying to write an account of game-playing which is part self-help, part political critique, part philosophical inventory. He wants us to be alive to the joys of yo-yo and at the same time to be conscious of the difference between ‘value federalism’ and ‘monocropping for the soul’. I don’t know if he is aware of how close his definitional approach comes to being the thing he is arguing against. He has certainly noticed that academics are often prone to the vices they are happy to condemn from behind the lectern.

I’ve seen a particularly ironic mirror of this in some of my fellow philosophy professors. I have known other professors who will teach classes about the problems of power, domination and centralisation. They will rage gloriously about how institutions rob people of their freedom to choose. At the very same time, in the very same classes, these professors will implement rigid and punishing grading scales, with tests written to enforce one very specific mode of thinking. When it comes to systems they build, it turns out that they are entirely willing to use grading as an incentive to push around students’ attention and cares. And I suspect the authoritarian structure of their classes might end up by undermining the anti-authoritarian message of their lectures.

Nguyen would like to throw away the mark book and encourage his students to write their papers for the sheer hell of it, though he has noticed that the pushback he gets when he tries that approach is from the students themselves. What, they ask, is the point if they won’t get a grade? But it is interesting that he doesn’t mention another common academic type – the teacher who celebrates power and domination in his or her work but encourages licentiousness behind the scenes. Nor does Nguyen reflect on whether his book, with its insistence on endlessly sharpening the distinction between good games and bad games, is seeking to impose its own mode of thinking.

Maybe I’m the one who needs to open up. Analytic philosophy is not my thing, but who’s to say I wouldn’t get more out of it if I bothered to learn the rules of the game? It feels too much like hard work to me, but then so does yo-yo. Nguyen’s simple message is that we are all too busy looking for value in the places where we have been conditioned to find it. Too often, without our realising it, those are the places where value has been captured by others. In his remorselessly binary way, he asks us to notice the big difference between what we can extract from what we think we know and what we can discover from what we have never really thought about:

It’s easy to get into a networking mindset. You go into a room full of people with one thought in your head: what can these people do for me? You sort them based on how they can serve your interests. Powerful people, people with the right connections or corporate position – they matter. People who can’t do anything for you: worthless. Ignore them. This is a kind of narrowed practical attitude.

But we can shift out of it. We can approach people without that filter and be open to the delights each new person might have to offer. Maybe this person has a weird obsession with gathering and replanting ferns in their backyard. That’s cool; you didn’t even know that was a thing. Maybe that person has some incredible stories to tell about completely falling to pieces after a bad break-up and then pulling themselves together when they got obsessed with fixing their city’s terrible zoning laws. Maybe this weird-looking guy with food in his beard has spent years working on a very thorough and heartfelt theory about why Nicolas Cage is the greatest artistic genius of our era. You’ll find out, if you let them take the lead.

Maybe. But if that’s the choice and those are the rules, I don’t think I want to go to the party at all.

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